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posted by n1 on Tuesday October 31 2017, @11:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the choose-your-words-carefully dept.

Submitted via IRC for boru

The Israel Police mistakenly arrested a Palestinian worker [...] because they relied on automatic translation software to translate a post he wrote on his Facebook page. The Palestinian was arrested after writing "good morning," which was misinterpreted; no Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before the man's arrest.

[...] the man posted on his Facebook page a picture from the construction site where he works in the West Bank settlement of Beitar Ilit near Jerusalem. In the picture he is leaning against a bulldozer alongside the caption: "Good morning" in Arabic.

The automatic translation service offered by Facebook uses its own proprietary algorithms. It translated "good morning" as "attack them" in Hebrew and "hurt them" in English.

Arabic speakers explained that English transliteration used by Facebook is not an actual word in Arabic but could look like the verb "to hurt" – even though any Arabic speaker could clearly see the transliteration did not match the translation.

Source: Haaretz


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 31 2017, @11:18PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 31 2017, @11:18PM (#590269) Journal

    I tried the classic 'my hovercraft is full of eels', it stabilised in one go :(

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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